3 Ways to Improve Sales Team Performance by Using Feedback

Your sales team are the soldiers on the frontline of your business, travelling across the UK or the globe to gain the clients you need to help your business go from strength to strength. Their role is often a balancing act, the kind where they’ve got to keep a client buttered up with conversation while still preparing them for the sell. Their job isn’t so different from a detective, searching for clues in a client’s body language, figuring out the perfect moment to leap in with an effective business offer.

With all this in mind, you might feel reluctant to request feedback from clients regarding your team of sales professionals. Will it cause more strain on your team, or antagonise clients who’d prefer to be getting on with their own business rather than improving yours?

The answer to both these questions is no. Implementing a system of feedback could be the mark of quality that your sales team is missing.

With that in mind, we’ve come up with a few ways that gaining feedback from customers can help improve your sales team’s performance.

You’ll Create a System

Leaving a short but meticulously crafted survey with clients is about more than receiving feedback for your company. It pushes a system of full and satisfying customer service for your clients, even if they decide not to work with you.

One of the oldest business psychology books on the market is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. He recommends that, in order to let a customer feel valued, you should give a customer the chance to vent their frustrations. In doing this, you show how open you are to their criticism and, most importantly, capable of listening.

By requesting feedback from your client, you’re saying: “We want to improve your experience in the future, and we’ll try as hard as we can to accommodate you.” Whether or not your deal is made, your systematic attitude towards customer service will leave a positive impression in your customer’s mind, which will lend you an advantage for business dealings in the future.

You Can Change Up

Change is vital for business. It keeps things fresh. That’s why the shop display of your favourite retailer will change every month, and websites will be given a fresh lick of paint every few years. Change, even if it’s only aesthetic, implies a step forward, a maintaining of relevance in a fast-moving world.

But without customer feedback, the changes you make to your sales process will be nothing more than a shot in the dark. Conversely, surveys will give you qualitative and quantitative data to work on, improving the sales experience with strategies part-developed by customers.

Everyone Can Improve

Your sales team aren’t the only people who’ll benefit from feedback. Every employee who encounters a customer will improve the levels of their service by understanding their likes and dislikes. Share your findings and you’ll retain many more customers down the line.

If you’d like to know more about how to boost your sales team by using feedback, please get in touch with a member of the team – we’ll be more than happy to talk through your options.